For our final episode of the season, we present a conversation with Ben Rhodes recorded at in Washington, D.C. at the end of May. Democracy Works is going on summer break. We'll be back with new episodes in September!

The Democracy Group's first live podcast recording featuring foreign policy expert and fellow podcaster Ben Rhodes  in conversation with Kamy Akhavan of Let's Find Common Ground and Stephanie Gerber Wilson of Freedom Over Fascism about America’s place on the world stage and how the health of American democracy impacts other democracies around the world. They also discuss how podcasting can shape messaging and narrative in a fractured media environment. 

About Ben Rhodes

Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. He is currently co-host of Pod Save the World. His work has also been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Foreign Affairs.  

From 2009-2017, Rhodes served as a speechwriter and Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. In that role, he led the secret negotiations with the Cuban government that resulted in the effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba.

To learn more about each of the featured podcasts, visit the Shows page at democracygroup.org/shows.

In a rebroadcast from 2023,  we discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our own personal mental health in the process. 

Many of us can conjure moments when politics made us feel sad. But how often do those feelings translate into more serious forms of depression or other mental health issues? And if politics does make us depressed, what do we do about it? Christopher Ojeda has spent the past few years exploring these questions and joins us this week to talk about the relationship between depression and democracy. 

Ojeda is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California Merced and author of the forthcoming book The Sad Citizen: How Politics Is Depressing and Why It Matters, which will be released in June from the University of Chicago press. He visited Penn State in 2023 to give us an early glimpse of this important work on the relationship between democratic engagement and individual mental health. We discuss how to meet the demands that democracy places on us without sacrificing our mental health in the process.

Jeff Sharlet has spent the past few years embedded in the deepest corners of the growing far-right movement in the United States. He's come to think of it as a black hole, something that can pull people in with ever-shifting grievances and a desire for power. He chronicles the movement and the characters in it in his book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War and joins us to discuss the book and how he's thinking about its thesis in the context of the new Trump administration. 

We also discuss some of Sharlet's more recent reporting on war churches in Idaho and Washington, and how things that were on the fringes of the movement five years ago are now squarely in the mainstream.

Sharlet is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, which was adapted into a Netflix documentary series, and This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers.

His reporting on LGBTQI+ rights around the world has received the National Magazine Award, the Molly Ivins Prize, and Outright International’s Outspoken Award. His writing and photography have appeared in many publications, including Vanity Fair, for which he is a contributing editor; The New York Times Magazine; GQ; Esquire; Harper’s Weekly; and VQR, for which he is an editor at large.

From fights over masks and vaccines to the loss of social connection, the year 2020 accelerated many of the trends that were already happening in America and created new obstacles for the country to overcome. In his book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, sociologist Eric Klinenberg takes on a journey back to that year and everything that happened in it through the eyes of seven New Yorkers, one from each of the city's boroughs.

Klinenberg, who recently delivered the Colloquium on the Environment lecture for the Penn State Sustainability Institute, joins us on Democracy Works to discuss how the pandemic accelerated political polarization and distrust in institutions in America and what we can do to repair that damage before the next pandemic or other major crisis comes our way. The book and the podcast interview allow us to see 2020—and, ultimately, ourselves—with clarity and empathy. 

Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave, and Fighting for Air. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and This American Life. He recently visited Penn State to present the 2025 Colloquium on the Environment for Penn State Sustainability; watch his lecture here.

Last week's Wisconsin Supreme Court election put a spotlight on state-level politics and the way that national politics can influence what happens in the states. But there are a lot of other developments happening at the state level that you might have missed. We catch up on what's happening with Alex Burness, a reporter who covers state and local democracy and criminal justice issues for Bolts.

As the name suggests, Bolts covers the "nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up." The topics we cover in this episode include:

• Felon disenfranchisement and mail-in voting
• Mail voting
• Threats to election administrators
• State-level Voting Rights Acts

We also discuss how national politics are shaping decisions that state legislatures make — even when those decisions appear to go against policies that people in a state overwhelmingly support. For more on this dynamic, check out our episode with Jake Grumbach on his book Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics.

Learn more about Bolts

Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how tech platforms have eroded over time. According to him, the process goes something like this: 

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Doctorow joins us in a collaborative interview with News Over Noise to discuss how enshittifiation has affected our ability to find information, engage in deliberative democracy, and more. We also discuss what coalitions are necessary to push back against enshittification and how science fiction can help us imagine a more democratic world.

Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including The Lost Cause, a science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency, and The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Production.

Doctorow's blog, Pluralistic

Doctorow's lecture on enshittification

As the lead investigator into both the 2017 racist riot in Charlottesville and the January 6 insurrection, Tim Heaphy has a unique perspective on the cynicism and anger that also fueled Trump’s return to the presidency. All three events, both the violent protests and the peaceful and lawful decisions made at the ballot box in November 2024, reflect an increasing lack of trust in institutions among a growing number of Americans. He reflects on his work and where we go from here in the book Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy

Heaphy joins us to discuss the divide between people who trust the system and people who don't and make the case for why a disengaged citizenry is the biggest threat to American democracy. We also discuss his reactions to the first few weeks of the Trump administration and the pardoning of people convicted in relation to January 6.

Heaphy served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2009-14. His previous experience included clerking for Judge John A. Terry of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and working for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. 

Chris Beem, McCourtney Institute for Democracy managing director and research professor of political science at Penn State, talks with author Jonathan Rauch about why the current crisis in American Christianity is also a crisis in American democracy.

In his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch (a lifelong atheist) asks what happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?

In the book and in this conversation, Rauch encourages Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state. 

This episode is the third in a series of discussions Chris has hosted about religion, liberalism, and democracy. The first was with journalist Tim Alberta about the evangelicals and the MAGA movement; the second was with political theorist Alex Lefebvre about the role of liberalism in our daily lives. Those episodes come together in this conversation with Rauch.

It's easy to feel defeated in the face of political challenges, but this episode shows that everyone has the capacity to create positive change and contribute to a culture of peace in their communities. In her book "Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change," Lisa Silvestri shows how ordinary people addressed issues in their communities form the West Bank to Baltimore.  

Silvestri found those stories through a process she calls "crowdsourcing hope" and found that deliberately seeking out peace led her to discover more and more of it. The book is grounded in the Ancient Greek virtue phronesis, which Silvestri explains in the interview. We also discuss how not all social action needs to be political — and why it might be better if it's not. 

After the interview, Cyanne Loyle and Candis Watts Smith discuss the power of using what frustrates you as an impetus for change, and how finding common cause can be more effective at reducing polarization than finding common ground.

Silvestri is an associate teaching professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State. She likes to think, write, and speak about war, peace, politics, social justice, digital culture, democracy and civic life. She has contributed to outlets including The Washington Post andThe New York Times and has spoken at The 92nd Street Y and The South by Southwest Festival.

Lisa Silvestri's website

Peace by Peace classroom guide

Instances of political violence around the 2024 election and vote certification on January 6, 2025 did not come to fruition the way some experts feared they would throughout last year. But that doesn't mean that we can forget about threats of political violence until it's time for the next election. In fact, political violence continues to rise in the United States and throughout western Europe.

Our guests this week, Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca of Freedom House and the George W. Bush Institute, are two of the leading voices on how to prevent political violence and create a healthier democracy. They join us to discuss what causes political violence and what democracies around the world can do to prevent it by addressing both cultural and structural issues in politics.

After the interview, Chris Beem and Cyanne Loyle discuss whether non-violent protest movements can successfully combat political violence amid growing polarization and support for political violence from some elected officials and political leaders.

Kleinfeld and Bibbins Sedaca are the authors of the article "How to Prevent Political Violence," which appeared in the fall 2024 issue of The Journal of Democracy.

Journal of Democracy article: How to Prevent Political Violence